How I use Slack to find my Audience

So a big part of Product Development is to Build, Measure & Learn — This is something that I have to do with StartupMill as I have a lot of ideas which I need to validate before I spend time on them.

The way I’ve found I can do this by finding the niche communities, such as this one, but using Slack.

Why Slack is good for this? Well there’s a number of reasons:

- Users that are part of these communities are typically highly engaged
- Because of this engagement level, you’ll often find early adopters
- These early adopters will want to give you feedback
- This feedback will in turn give you the insights that help you build the best service and product out there

Additionally, a lot of groups are geographically based, which is great for targeting. Meaning I can easily test out some messaging in Australia, without impacting future core users in the UK.

This led me to build a database of different slack groups, which I still regularly expand in — It’s all on www.Top50Slack.com now as I’ve been asked to share this so many times now.

The databases has over 3K in groups, so I can just quickly log in and do a quick search, join those communities and talk to people directly. I’ve been helping to connect a lot of fellow entrepreneurs with other groups to help them grow.

Pretty much any new project is now pinged and discussed in a Slack group first and then refined through the user insights I’ve gathered from that audience.

Hope this tip helps you build your next project!

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